A small act of mischief on screen can feel more honest to the brain than an act of spotless kindness. Viewers often report that characters like Maruko, who lie, slack off, or sulk, seem strangely closer to real life than flawless heroes or endlessly patient parents.
One driver is how the social brain predicts behavior. Everyday interaction is full of minor rule breaking, selfish impulses, and quick flashes of guilt. When a character cheats on homework or snaps at a friend and then regrets it, the pattern matches the brain’s baseline model of human behavior, reducing cognitive dissonance. Perfect kindness, by contrast, creates low “entropy” in the story world: nothing unpredictable, no friction, little need for the brain to update its internal statistics about how people act.
Mischievous behavior also exposes interior conflict. Viewers see not only what a character does, but the rationalizations and shame that follow. That layered signal lets the audience run rich social simulations: they test motives, track shifting loyalties, and compare the on‑screen compromise with their own. Moral psychology research shows that people judge others not only by outcomes but by visible struggle and intention. A clumsy apology after a prank can feel more trustworthy than a calm, perfectly ethical response that never wavers.
Finally, flawed characters generate narrative “marginal effects” on attention. Small deviations from norms act like spikes in a noisy data stream, making scenes more memorable and emotionally tagged. Heroic consistency quickly becomes background; petty jealousy or laziness stands out and anchors recall. For many viewers, a character like Maruko does not just entertain; she offers a low‑stakes sandbox for rehearsing everyday failure, repair, and forgiveness, which is often where real emotional life unfolds.
